the art life

Got new work you'd like to share? Send JPEGs no larger than 300k each to theartlife at hot mail dot com.

Labels: illustration, new work, painting

"Over the 100-year history of modern neuroscience, the way we think about the brain has evolved with the sophistication of the techniques available to study it. Improvements in microscope design and manufacture, together with the development of cell-staining techniques, afforded neuroscientists their first glimpse at the specialized cells that make up the nervous system. Microscopes with more magnifying power enabled them to probe nerve cells in greater detail, revealing distinct compartments. Newer techniques expose the connections between nerve cells, revealing the complex organization of the brain.

"Nineteenth-century histologists created some of the first images of nerve cells by chemically stiffening tissue and then immersing it in silver nitrate, randomly staining a small number of cells to make them visible when they were viewed with powerful new light microscopes. The technique revealed the silhouette of the cell body and its network of extensions, and it enabled the great neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal to prove that the nervous system consists of cells. He produced the 1899 drawing at left: it shows finely branched Purkinje cells, large neurons in the cerebellum that play an important role in controlling movement..."

More => Time Travel Through the Brain, Technology Review

Labels: drawing, science

"After just 20 minutes in a helicopter above the Manhattan skyline, autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire was ready to re-create a city that took hundreds of years to build.

Wiltshire is drawing a 20-foot panoramic view of New York - all from memory.

The 35-year-old artist's autistic disorder affects his ability to interact with other people.

It has also given him a photographic memory - and a gift for putting it on paper.

"I just looked without drawing," said Wiltshire as he explained how he is able to draw the skyline without referring back to a photograph of the city.

"Everything is like a TV show," he said. "I have never drawn from a sketchbook."

Wiltshire, a Londoner, is creating the image at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, where the public can watch him work through Friday afternoon.

New York is the last in a series of eight panoramas of major cities across the world, including Dubai and Tokyo.

"This city is very beautiful," he said, as he drew the Big Apple from the Bronx to Staten Island.

"It has got skyscrapers ...and the American people."

Read more: NY Daily News.com

Labels: art news, drawing

Labels: art prize, painting, Tom Polo

Barney Rubble asks: I’m thinking of entering an art competition, should I enter? The competition asks that I send a CV and/or an artist’s statement with my entry – is it wise to do so?

Dear Barney: If the art competition is themed – say, it is a competition for religious art, or small scale sculpture – you should only consider entering if your work engages with a religious or spiritual theme, or is a small scale sculpture. But you’re thinking – hey, my work is sculpture but it’s quite big, or, my work has nothing to do with religion or spirituality per se, but could be interpreted that way, can’t I just go ahead and enter anyway? Yes, you can still enter but don’t be surprised if the work fails to win or isn’t selected as a finalist. If your work is small in scale, is a sculpture, and is a statue of Jesus, go right ahead – in fact why not enter both competitions? It can’t hurt. If the competition is an open theme or organised around some vague category [genre art, for example] enter as often as you can. But a word of warning: if the competition says that you can send multiple images, only send images that support your entry. Very often judges will look at support images or additional entries for some clarification of an artist’s practice. If you send one work that is great and two additional works that aren’t as good [i.e. they are crappy] this will almost certainly disqualify you. As for sending a CV, art can often appear mysterious and an explanation of the artist’s intentions can be quite helpful to judges who are baffled by the use of obscure symbolism, or conversely, are baffled by the use of rainbows, dolphins and/or sulphur crested cockatoos. On the other hand, an explanation can lead to more confusion. Choose your words wisely. Consulting a curriculum vitae can help determine an artist’s experience and help work out if you really are an “emerging artist”. Most CVs list educational qualifications, prizes, awards and an exhibition history, but there’s no requirement that you are limited to these achievements. Artists might like to include press clippings on their work from local newspapers, art magazines or personality profiles from naturist magazines. If this information helps the judges make a decision on your work, intention and personality, include it! Hope this is helpful – and good luck!

Got a question about the art world you'd like answered? Just send it to the art life at hot mail dot com.

Labels: Ask The Art Life

Sylvania Waters is one of those select few television programs that became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. It had an impact more significant than anything that can be simply conferred via hype, clever advertising or sensational content. It is well remembered, its cast of personalities, its locations and conflicts are the stuff of urban legend. Sylvania Waters remains an archaeological layer in the public memory of the Shire, of Sydney and indeed, of the whole country.



Elvis Richardson, SYLVANIA WATERS / ELVIS RANTS AWAY I, 2009
Iinkjet print on vinyl stretched on wooden frame, 300 x 450 cm
Courtesy the artist & Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

It’s odd recalling the impact it had in the light of what followed. Sylvania Waters is sometimes retrospectively referred to as “reality television”. When you think of what “reality television” now means – those competition-based shows where the only element of the production that could loosely be called “reality” is the unscripted dialogue – Sylvania Waters was a far more traditional proposition; it was a documentary.

The show’s appeal – and its enduring legacy – was based on its unblushing portrayal of a segment of Australian society that had, until that time, never been seen on television – those upwardly mobile Aussies who were making money while living the good life with views of the water – an apparently gauche lifestyle aspiration that would become the national ideal during the coming decade.

The fragmented nature of the Donaher/Baker family – its de facto relationships, the complicated emotional expectations of would-be step fathers and new children, estranged sons and daughters, the next generation and their partners – and those always-pressing questions of middle class life like HSC results, overseas trips and what to do for Christmas day – all of this made for a startling TV program that created something exotic from the mundane.

What made it all the more remarkable was that Sylvania Waters wasn’t scripted. Yes, it was edited, and narrated, and it had a narrative arc shaped and tweaked by its producers and directors where true reality has no shape, no arc – but still, Noeline and Laurie and Paul and Dione and Michael and all the rest were real people – not the creation of writers. This was the undeniable reality of this particular TV.



Luis Martinez, Macintyre Crescent, 2009
Graphite pencil on Stonehenge paper, 45 x 76 cm
Courtesy the artist & Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney.

The shock of recognition, that identification with the real, is emblematic of the whole Sylvania Waters phenomena. As Daniel Mudie Cunningham explains in his excellent Reality Check catalogue essay, in the early 90s the TV show was the subject of ridicule by a media horrified that something so crass could be held up, not just as entertainment, but something that was representative of the entire country as the show screened in the UK as a reality-based companion piece to Neighbours and Home & Away.

It was only later, when shows like Kath & Kim or the movie The Castle became hits that we started to relax and accept that this seemingly distorted televisual mirror was a lot closer to home that we could recognise at the time. How could we have known back in 1992 that the Donaher’s were part of a class that were heirs to a glittering future, the decade of power and influence that would transform the entire country into a Sylvania Waters facsimile. How quaint and silly that media outrage seems now.

The works in Reality Check deal with the complexity of identification between the mediated experience and that thing we call real life – a complicated emotional transaction between people who are only known to us as images, apparently with agency and emotion and free will, just like us, but also provocative abstractions of ideas and ideals that are shared notions of identity, both personal and public, local and national. This back and forth is a fertile, imaginative ground for the creation of art.

An edited version of an opening talk by The Art Life for Reality Check: Watching Sylvania Waters, at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery until November 29.

Labels: exhibitions, regional galleries

The University of Melbourne Art History program in conjunction with the School of Culture and Communications and the Fine Arts Network invite you to attend a free public lecture by Dr Amelia Douglas, Recipient of 2009 Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in the PhD, University of Melbourne.

What is at stake in the making and recording of history, and what does it mean for a contemporary artist to work as an historiographer? The contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe is well-known for his multi-faceted works that operate in the gaps between history and story. In this lecture, Hugyhe’s practice is shown to facilitate a new model of contemporary history. History as a discursive concept is pliable; its meaning shifts depending on contexts. In presenting an historiographic reading of Huyghe’s practice, this lecture reflects upon how the coalescence of story and history may be a key factor in pulling together the diverse strands of Australian and international art histories.

Pierre Huyghe is one of the most significant artists of the 21st century. His work – encompassing film, architecture, situations, installations and events – has been shown at the TATE Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and recently at the Biennale of Sydney (2008), where Huyghe transformed the Opera House into a tropical rainforest. This lecture focuses on a few of Huyghe's major works, including A Journey That Wasn't (2005) and Streamside Day Follies (2003) and will include clips from several of Huyghe's works not previously exhibited in Australia, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

Dr Amelia Douglas is a lecturer, editor, curator and writer with a research focus on time-based contemporary art. Her prior projects include Assistant Curator, Australian Centre for the Moving Image 2008-09; guest speaker, 'Andreas Gursky', NGV International 2009; guest lecturer, 'Perspectives in Radical Art', School of Creative Arts, 2008-09; tutor, art history and curatorship, University of Melbourne, 2005-08. She is a founding co-editor of emaj; member UNmagazine editorial committee; co-curator Found Sound: The Experimental Instrument Project; board member Bus Projects; and contributor to numerous critical forums (ACMI, Conical, GCAS), exhibition catalogues (Craft Victoria, Blindside, Experimenta Media Arts, RMIT First Site, George Paton Gallery), and arts journals including Broadsheet, UNmagazine, SPEECH and The Open Space (New York). She is currently managing red gallery contemporary art space in Melbourne.

Public lecture presented by the University of Melbourne Art History program in conjunction with the School of Culture and Communications and the Fine Arts Network.

Labels: press releases

Labels: conceptual art, new work

"Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new—an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel—she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows—a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle. Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy...."


Mrs Logic: The one argument Ayn Rand Couldn't win, New York Books.

Labels: philosophy, right wing nut jobs

If an artist has their work stolen they are entitled to:


The full weight of the law to regain their rightful property 46% 69
Be cool if their work was stolen by another artist 14% 21
Act like a d@#k 13% 20
Suck it up if they're a millionaire 27% 41

151 votes total

Labels: poll

"We're launching the 2009 FBi 94.5 and Time Out Sydney SMAC [Sydney Music Arts and Culture] Awards this coming WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 21 at gbk, Gallery Barry Keldoulis in Waterloo from 6-8pm. The finalists for 'Best Artist' will be on display at gbk - and the rest of the category nominations will be announced on the night. So come on down, bring your friends, have a beer and celebrate the work of some of the finest creative minds in Sydney!"

Labels: art prize, exhibitions, press releases

Writes Jesse Cohen: "The MCA is desperate to find money to redevelop their building and they have at least two prominent Jewish bankers in their sights as potential donors. How to explain, then, that they decided to name their current exhibition after a book Making it New by a famous anti-semite Ezra Pound who produced propaganda for the fascists in the Second World War and famously [claimed that] Jewish bankers were responsible for the world's problems?"



Dear Jesse - Yes, it does seem odd doesn't it? "Jewish bankers" undewriting a real estate adventure of a museum of contemporary art that gives oxygen to a Fascist sympathiser and reknowned anti-semite. But the thing is this - no one cares about Ezra Pound's politics anymore. Pound is a popular reference point if you want to give an exhibition a little bit of intellectual clout and thus you will find shows such as Making It New at the MCA or In A Station of The Metro, Shaun Gladwell's survey show at Artspace in 2007 - named after Pound's poems. The art world like its politics to be as contemporary as its art and doesn't really care for battles that were fought and won some sixty four years ago. It also helps that in Pound's case he was also a pretty decent poet. Indeed, if you were a decent artist of any political stripe it hardly matters what your actual beliefs were while you were alive, with enough time it can all be happily forgotten, ignored or reinterpreted. Just take a look at the recent Futurism exhibition in London and the Tate Modern. And the great thing about the largesse of art world benefactors is that they seem quite happy to give cash to institutions, galleries and other cultural bodies to stage events that may in some form contain content they don't personally agree with. It's called democracy. It might also be a mistake to think that "Jewish Bankers" have no sense of irony.

Got a question about the art world you'd like answered? Just send it to the art life at hot mail dot com.

Labels: Ask The Art Life, fascism, poetry

Chinese copies of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of America’s first president were denounced by the artist, desired by collectors—and ended up in some important museums.

It’s an international exercise in intrigue,” said Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.

He was speaking about a painting that was recently donated to the museum and is now on exhibition. The label reads: “George Washington c. 1800–1805.” The work is a copy of a Gilbert Stuart painting attributed to a Chinese artist named Foeiqua—who, like other artists in China, made a number of reverse paintings on glass. (The artist paints on the back of the glass so that the image can be seen from the front.)



“The painting was donated by a Connecticut woman, Caroline N. Dealy,” Hyland said. “She said her mother had died and that members of her family wanted to give the painting in memory of their mother. Since we are the oldest museum of American art in the United States, we were really thrilled. The museum has wanted to acquire a portrait of George Washington for many years.

“As soon as it went on display, it became the subject of a great debate: Should it be at an American art museum? Is it an American work of art? The truth is that it’s a copy of a Stuart made by a Chinese artist for an American collector. It’s a compelling story. It was painted 200 years ago, and 200 years later we’re dealing with the same issues. There are still works being pirated in China today—movies, books, CDs.”

Stuart had to deal with the issues in 1802, when there was, according to Carl Crossman in his book The China Trade (1972), “a mania for Washingtoniana...”

The Many Faces of George Washington, ArtNews

Labels: art news, portraiture

"The Archibald-winning artist Fred Cress has made his plans for his funeral. ''I've got the grog for the wake,'' he says, knowing he has only a few weeks of life left.

The cancer that began seven years ago in his prostate has spread voraciously since autumn. It is now in his spine, his groin, his lungs.

''But the one that will kill me is the liver cancer,'' he says. ''That has spread right across here now,'' he says, drawing a line across his gut.

The 71-year-old is dealing with imminent death much better than his younger partner of 20 years, Victoria Fernandez - or his two sons, Julian and Kim, by his former wife. ''They're in denial,'' he says. ''I wish they'd get on and organise the funeral.''

After all, lots of people will want to come. When the ABC's 7.30 Report prematurely broadcast a farewell piece in July (''They jumped the gun,'' Cress says), the artist - enjoying his final summer with Victoria in their beloved second home in Burgundy - was inundated with emails from around the world.

He apologises for not replying to them all. But he was feeling remarkably good then, and thought it more important to paint his final canvases while he still had the strength. Ironically, given that Cress does not believe in any kind of after life (and certainly not heaven or hell), ''we might have to borrow a church … because quite a few people will want to speal."

No time for rage or regret, Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: art news

© Elodie Silberstein, Photo Kent Johnson, Model Rhiannon Bulley

Ningyo lies at the intersection of artistic and medical practice by dealing with Anorexia Nervosa. The installation will be part of Mirrors, an annual charity art exhibition addressing issues of body image within today’s society. For this site specific work, Elodie Silberstein has sought real life stories to create a tableau vivant (living picture), a screening and an intimate diary compiled from testimonies that reflect the complexity and heterogeneity of this mental illness. The model’s poses on the preparatory photographs are inspired by the ambivalent nature of dolls that are trapped in time and present many allegories with pubertal children suffering from anorexia. Elodie’s character expresses the polarity between beauty and death by starkly reminding us that the mortality rate of eating disorders is between 10-20% in Australia. This work is dedicated to Catena Di Mauro who died in February 2009 after a nine year battle against anorexia. Elodie Silberstein - More info.

Mirrors is open for artwork submission. To participate, please visit Mirrorsexhibition.wordpress.com Mirror is, supported by Yen Magazine and is the initiative of Rhiannon Bulley, a young woman in recovery from Anorexia Nervosa. All profits from the sale of nominated art works will go towards supporting The Butterfly Foundation.

Labels: new work, photography

"Beuys tried his luck as a pop singer as part of his political commitment. His song 'Sonne statt Reagan' attacks Ronald Reagan's arms policy. The song was issued as a record and Beuys appeared before big audiences with it during the peace movement's demonstrations and also with the group Die Desserteure in the ARD television broadcast 'Bananas' on 3.7.1982. 'Regen'', pronounced like 'Reagan', is the German for 'rain.'"

UbuWEb via Art Forum

Labels: conceptual art, politics, video art

"There are over 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the US, or about 1 for every 23,000 Americans. But even market penetration this advanced doesn’t mean that McDonald’s is everywhere. Somewhere in South Dakota is the McFarthest Spot, the place in the US geographically most removed from the nearest McD’s. If you started out from this location, a few miles north of State Highway 20 (which runs latitudinally between Highways 73 in the west and 65 in the east), you’d have to drive 145 miles to get your Big Mac (if you could fly, however, it’d be only 107 miles).

"This map is the brainchild of Stephen Von Worley, who got to thinking about the strip malls sprawling out along I-5 in California’s ever less rural Central Valley: “Just how far can you get from generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?” His yardstick for that thought experiment would be the ubiquitous Golden Arches of McDonald’s – still the world’s largest hamburger chain, and to cite Von Worley, the “inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.” That’s not the whole story: like other convenience providers aimed at the motorised consumer such as gas stations and motels, McDonald’ses have a notable tendency to occur on highways and, specifically, to cluster at their crossroads..."

Via Strange Maps.

Labels: data visualisation, Maps